Edgcombe Hilary, Murithi Gatwiri, Mungai Mary, Okelo Stephen, Molyneux Sassy, Higham Helen, English Mike
Nuffield Department of Medicine, Health Systems Collaborative, Centre for Global Health Research, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Safe Surgery and Anesthesia Program, Centre for Public Health and Development, Nairobi, Kenya.
Front Health Serv. 2025 Jul 3;5:1625409. doi: 10.3389/frhs.2025.1625409. eCollection 2025.
Clinicians, NGOs, funders and academics (among others) in global health are accustomed to discussion of the "low-resource setting". Commonly, the resources implicit in this term are physical (equipment, drugs) and infrastructural (electricity, water and sanitation) in nature. Human resources are well recognised as scarce in this context too, and the focus in most "workforce" research is on the number, distribution and/or training of healthcare workers. In this article, we make the case for closer examination of "social resource" as necessary to patient safety and distinct from simple enumeration of available/trained personnel. We use the clinical specialty of anaesthesia as a case study, identifying the different ways in which social resource is necessary to enable safe practice for anaesthesia providers, and the potential challenges to accessing social resource relevant in the low- and middle-income context. Finally, we suggest ways in which social resource for anaesthesia professionals in LMICs might be meaningfully investigated, with a view to improving its priority and access for safe anaesthesia care worldwide.
全球卫生领域的临床医生、非政府组织、资助者和学者（等等）习惯于讨论“资源匮乏环境”。通常，这个术语所隐含的资源本质上是物质资源（设备、药品）和基础设施资源（电力、水和卫生设施）。在这种情况下，人力资源也被公认为稀缺，并且大多数“劳动力”研究的重点是医护人员的数量、分布和/或培训。在本文中，我们提出有必要更深入地审视“社会资源”，因为它对患者安全至关重要，且不同于对现有/受过培训人员的简单罗列。我们以麻醉临床专业为例进行研究，确定社会资源以哪些不同方式对麻醉提供者的安全实践至关重要，以及在低收入和中等收入背景下获取相关社会资源时可能面临的挑战。最后，我们提出一些方法，通过这些方法可以对低收入和中等收入国家麻醉专业人员的社会资源进行有意义的调查，以期提高其在全球安全麻醉护理中的优先级并增加其可及性。
